The cradle-to-grave, government-supported existence of “Julia”

posted at 1:21 pm on May 3, 2012 by Ed Morrissey

Today’s buzz surrounds the rollout of yet another composite character from the imagination of Barack Obama, this one named “Julia.” Julia represents the arc of a life under the beneficent care of Barack Obama’s policies. Interestingly, at every stage of Julia’s life, a government program exists to shield her from life’s woes. And just as interestingly, Julia never gets the bill for all of this government hand-holding.

Let’s present a more realistic view of Julia’s life:

3 years old – Julia gets a new-and-improved Head Start, which a new HHS study shows won’t do anything for her anyway.

17 years old – Race to the Top improves Julia’s SAT scores. Is there any evidence at all to support that argument? Even so, she’s down the list from all of the home-schooled children and the charter- and private-school students who actually got an education rather than an NEA indoctrination. However, thanks to the NEA indoctrination, Julia is now better prepared for a life on the government dole.

18 years old – Julia’s family qualifies for a $10,000 tuition tax credit spread out over four years, while Obama’s student-loan subsidies drive tuition costs up even faster.

22 years old – Julia undergoes surgery, which has to be funded by her parents’ employers despite Julia being an adult, and which will be most likely delayed as providers decline in number thanks to the economics of ObamaCare.

23 years old — Thanks to the Lily Ledbetter Act, trial attorneys get rich by filing lawsuits against employers that otherwise wouldn’t have been brought, leaving fewer resources to hire Julia. No college job for our intrepid Julia!

25 years old – Julia finally gets her 4-year degree in seven years, thanks to the inability to handle the tuition bubble and the lack of work. However, the good news is that the $200,000 in student loans will only hang over her head for 20 years, while taxpayers like Julia end up paying for the costs of default.

27 years old – Julia wants to have sex for the first time in her life, apparently, and is looking for contraception. Her employer would provide it for free thanks to the ObamaCare HHS mandate … if she could only find a job.

31 years old – Julia gets pregnant, which tells you all you need to know about free contraception. Oddly, Julia hasn’t gotten married first, probably because the economy is so poor by this time with the huge entitlement debt crisis breaking that no one can conceive of putting a home together. Fortunately, ObamaCare makes pregnancy possible, because until Obama took office, no one ever got pregnant, since government support and approval for it didn’t exist.

37 years old – Julia’s son Zachary, named after his sperm donor, starts school. Head Start has long since disappeared, apparently, but Race to the Top still exists. Must be a marathon.

42 years old – Julia starts a business with an SBA loan, which also apparently never existed before Obama took office. Her student loans are just three years away from defaulting onto the backs to taxpayers, so that’s good news.

65 years old – My, how time flies! (Do women do nothing of value between 42 and 65?) Julia enrolls in Medicare, which ceased to exist decades earlier, thanks to the fact that Obama and Tim Geithner didn’t have a plan to address the debt crisis — all they knew was they didn’t like anyone else’s plan. You can get the cards at Spencer’s as a gag gift.

67 years old – Julia retires, since the entitlement collapse wiped out her business and the rest of the American economy. The timeline stops here, which suggests that the IPAB probably denied her care, as she was nothing but a drain on society by this time, and the few resources they have left had to be used to pay for face lifts for members of Congress.

There you have it — a timeline filled with government interventions in a fantasy lifetime, with absolutely no sense of the cost it would take to provide Government Nanny to Julia and the rest of the country. At least they picked the right name for their fantasy woman trapped in an all-encompassing government; Julia was the name of the lead female character in George Orwell’s 1984, after all.

One point jumps out at me from Obama’s “Julia.” Not once in this timeline does Team Obama mention anything about a second Obama term. There isn’t one new policy or proposal in it. For a campaign with the slogan “Forward,” that seems a little odd. Just when does Obama plan on discussing his vision of a second term … December?

David Harsanyi blasts the nanny-state mentality that believes this scenario is cause for celebration:

In the new Barack Obama campaign piece The Life of Julia, voters can “Take a look at how President Obama’s policies help one woman over her lifetime — and how Mitt Romney would change her story.” It is one of the most brazenly statist pieces of campaign literature I can ever remember seeing.

Let’s, for the purposes of this post, set aside the misleading generalizations regarding policy in the ad (no one is innocent on that account, obviously). What we are left with is a celebration of a how a woman can live her entire life by leaning on government intervention, dependency and other people’s money rather than her own initiative or hard work. It is, I’d say, implicitly un-American, in the sense that it celebrates a mindset we have — outwardly, at least — shunned.

It is also a mindset that women should find offensively patronizing. When they’re old enough, I hope my two daughters will find the notion that their success hinges on the president’s views on college-loan interest rates preposterous. Yet, according to the “Life of Julia,” women are helpless without the guiding hand of Barack Obama.

Plus there’s this parting shot:

If you think Social Security benefits allow you to live your retirement without worry, you deserve Barack Obama.

If you think Social Security will still be around under the leadership of Obama and Geithner, you have a screw loose.

3 Years Old
Julianne’s parents read to her every night. They take time to play games with her that teach her how to count and how to solve problems. When they enroll her in kindergarten she’s ready to learn and succeed.

17 Years Old
Julianne excels in school thanks to her parents’ active involvement in her life. Her mother is a stay at home mom that carefully monitors Julianne’s homework and grades throughout her scholastic tenure. Her father takes practice SAT tests with her and encourages her to work hard.

18 Years Old
Julianne’s parents have put part of their yearly salary towards a college fund for her ever since she was born. They also encouraged her to get a part-time job in high school and required her to contribute part of her paycheck to the fund. As a result, Julianne can afford the college of her choice.

22 Years Old
During college, Julianne requires emergency surgery. She is covered by her insurance, which she can afford because it is a low-premium package designed specifically for this kind of unexpected expense. She pays for it with the part-time job she got the first week she arrived on campus.

Be sure to read it all.

Update II: Suitably Flip reworks the graphics to depict the life of Julie under Mitt Romney. It’s graphic and not excerptable, but you’ll want to see the whole thing anyway.